Cliffski, that's not precisely what I said. What I said is that it's perfectly all right for RMS to propose a business model that's not based on monopoly rents, and people who flame off at him for doing that are mistaken.
I in fact work for a commercial software company. I also wrote one of the two open source software packages that my company now competes with. The irony is that because we released that software as open source software rather than as free software, competitors sprang up and ate our lunch, and we wound up having to go closed source ourselves. Had we started out releasing free software, that probably never would have happened. So I happen to think that RMS has a point.
Stallman isn't mostly harmless. He's let the wind out of the sails of a really pernicious business model. For the people who were prospering on the basis of that model, he is pretty much the antichrist. The reason you think he's mostly harmless is that you are not one of those people, not that he is not effective (a less polite way of saying "mostly harmless.").
Oh, the woe! Stallman is trying to get people to voluntarily stop engaging in practices that create artificial scarcity for the purposes of artificially inflating stock values. If he succeeds, the CEOs of our companies will no longer be able to justify their huge compensation and golden parachutes, and will no longer be able to dangle the promise of riches, in the form of stock options, in front of us so as to trick us into accepting lower pay, long hours and lousy benefits.
Better usability will help with acceptance. Usability is better than it's ever been, but it's still fairly bad, and there are lots more people who know how to hack around XP usability problems than know how to hack around Linux usability problems, which means that even in cases where Linux in theory does better, in practice it doesn't.
Secondly, we really need Free Hardware. The OLPC is really cool, but it's not Free Hardware - only the software is Free. Of course you know Free::Freedom, not Free::$0. The OLPC would be a great platform if it weren't completely captive to the OLPC project. If we had open source specs for a decent laptop, getting it manufactured wouldn't be all that hard, and Microsoft doesn't have any control over fabs in China and Taiwan - it would be difficult if not impossible for them to exert any real leverage there, since the fabs aren't their customers.
The problem with SMTP is not that it won out over something better, but that it hasn't been replaced by something better yet, because it's "good enough." Only it's not "good enough," as witness how insanely badly it works in the presence of people who are willing to behave badly.
Likewise, people are not generally willing to replace IPv4, even though it is already obsolete, because it works, and there are workarounds for the things about it that are obsolete.
What I find amusing about the reactions to this guy's article is that they are lambasting him for, essentially, being correct. He's right that SMTP is the wrong way to do mail on the Internet. He's right that IPv4 is obsolete. And he's right that, in the former case, nobody is even working on solving the problem. Whereas in the latter case, the hard work that's being done to replace IPv4 is largely being ignored by people who are perfectly happy to just run NATs everywhere and hope for the best.
Instead of making fun of what this gentleman has to say, you might want to listen.
What color is the sky on your planet? Never ever take a working code base and re-develop it from scratch? First of all, rumor (in the form of TFA) has it that the code base *isn't* working. Secondly, the refactoring of Mozilla took such a long time that a lot of people gave up on it, and in fact there's a very nice replacement for it called WebKit. This is a win-win situation.
The question here is, can the Bulgarian team do it. Apparently CMU believes they can. Why not wait and see what the outcome is before rushing to judgement?
Re:You had me right up to "Agile."
on
Clean Code
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· Score: 1
Of course it makes sense. Otherwise it wouldn't have gotten popular. The question is, does it *work*, or is it just a nice theory?
You had me right up to "Agile."
on
Clean Code
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· Score: 3, Insightful
For some reason, whenever I see that word in reference to programming, I want to run screaming in the opposite direction. Does that make me a bad person?
Hard drives contain a *lot* of recyclable material - they're mostly metal. If you throw yours in the trash, you are indeed creating a lot of unnecessary waste.
Um. I wasn't talking about CDs. I can get high-quality digital audio on iTunes or Amazon right now, and there is no physical media, and no box to throw out.
Why, oh why, does nobody actually read to the end of the comment anymore?:'}
These rationalizations all sound great, but they are just that: rationalizations. Corporate users don't operate on a grand level on the basis of rationalizations. Corporate users will not lead the deployment of IPv6.
Who led the personal computer revolution? Corporations? No. Corporations are conservative. They follow the trailing edge, not the leading edge. Corporations adopted PCs because their employees started finding ways around corporate policies/against/ PCs, not because of some grand central plan to do so.
IPv6 adoption will go the same way. Individuals who discover uses for IPv6 will start using it. Departments will adopt it. Large IT organizations will legislate against it. Eventually it'll be deployed because the people who actually use the network will have enough pull to tell the IT departments what to do.
So look for IPv6 adoption to happen first in the home, and later in internal corporate teams, and *finally* at the corporate level. Not vice versa.
If you're going to use screws, for God's sake get an impact driver and not a regular electric drill/driver. It'll cost four times as much, and cut the time you spend dealing with stripped heads by at least the same factor.
I have a Bosch impact driver, cost me $200 at toolladies.com, and in the month I've owned it and the two small projects I've done with it so far it's got to have saved me at least five hours of work.
Of course, the problem isn't people who want to live off their works for the rest of their lives. It's people who want those works to remain under copyright protection for half a century or more after the author has died. And it's all of the works that nobody is making any money on anymore, but that nevertheless are lost to the world because, since they are under copyright, and the owners of the copyright can't be located, the works can't be digitized.
The bottom line is that unless you don't have any online presence, your email address is going to leak, and it's going to wind up on spammer's lists. If you want to avoid getting spam, some other solution is called for.
Um, hello, what good is an encrypted transport if you don't know who you're talking to? And if all your data is going through an MitM, in what sense is the initial handshake that establishes your connection secure?
The point of ssh and ssl is to make sure that nobody eavesdrops on your communications, and to make sure that you are talking to whom you think you are talking. These two go hand in hand. If you can't get the second, you don't have the first.
So really, all that an encrypted connection does in the absence of identity verification is to give you a false sense of security.
When your mind isn't working well, there are scams that you can buy into. One of the classic 419 scams is to tell you that you're the heir of a guy from Australia (or South Africa, if you live in Australia) who made a fortune in mining, died with no relatives, and mentioned you in his will because of a kindness you did 40 years ago.
It's not illegal for you to get the inheritance. It's just hard, because of issues involving international money transfers. You could be totally willing to, and even planning to, pay the taxes once the money arrives. But before it arrives, there are some banking fees you'll have to pay, which are only large because the amount being transfered is so much larger.
Actually, what it's no different than is your grandmother getting her purse rifled through by the nice man she thought she could trust, and some drugs stashed there. And then getting arrested for it.
It's not just dumb people. It's your mom or dad, if they wind up with some kind of aging-related disease that affects their judgement. Or you, in a few years. Losing everything because of that is a pretty harsh outcome.
Well, sort of. If you have a DNSSEC-aware resolver, and you are looking up a record in a signed zone, then the man-in-the-middle attack you're proposing doesn't work, because the signatures don't check out. So it is possible to prevent the problem you're describing.
The reason we have this problem is, very simply, that in many of the larger TLDs, the top-level zone is not signed. So there's no chain of trust, so even if you sign your zone, I have no way to get your key, because I have no chain of trust to follow.
There are solutions to this - register in a signed TLD, like.se, for example. Or use DNS Lookaside Validation. But ultimately the situation you describe will continue to be the default until the big zones are signed, and people who do transactions that require security start signing their zones.
It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, unfortunately.
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Cliffski, that's not precisely what I said. What I said is that it's perfectly all right for RMS to propose a business model that's not based on monopoly rents, and people who flame off at him for doing that are mistaken.
I in fact work for a commercial software company. I also wrote one of the two open source software packages that my company now competes with. The irony is that because we released that software as open source software rather than as free software, competitors sprang up and ate our lunch, and we wound up having to go closed source ourselves. Had we started out releasing free software, that probably never would have happened. So I happen to think that RMS has a point.
Stallman isn't mostly harmless. He's let the wind out of the sails of a really pernicious business model. For the people who were prospering on the basis of that model, he is pretty much the antichrist. The reason you think he's mostly harmless is that you are not one of those people, not that he is not effective (a less polite way of saying "mostly harmless.").
Oh, the woe! Stallman is trying to get people to voluntarily stop engaging in practices that create artificial scarcity for the purposes of artificially inflating stock values. If he succeeds, the CEOs of our companies will no longer be able to justify their huge compensation and golden parachutes, and will no longer be able to dangle the promise of riches, in the form of stock options, in front of us so as to trick us into accepting lower pay, long hours and lousy benefits.
What a bad, bad man he is.
Better usability will help with acceptance. Usability is better than it's ever been, but it's still fairly bad, and there are lots more people who know how to hack around XP usability problems than know how to hack around Linux usability problems, which means that even in cases where Linux in theory does better, in practice it doesn't.
Secondly, we really need Free Hardware. The OLPC is really cool, but it's not Free Hardware - only the software is Free. Of course you know Free::Freedom, not Free::$0. The OLPC would be a great platform if it weren't completely captive to the OLPC project. If we had open source specs for a decent laptop, getting it manufactured wouldn't be all that hard, and Microsoft doesn't have any control over fabs in China and Taiwan - it would be difficult if not impossible for them to exert any real leverage there, since the fabs aren't their customers.
The problem with SMTP is not that it won out over something better, but that it hasn't been replaced by something better yet, because it's "good enough." Only it's not "good enough," as witness how insanely badly it works in the presence of people who are willing to behave badly.
Likewise, people are not generally willing to replace IPv4, even though it is already obsolete, because it works, and there are workarounds for the things about it that are obsolete.
What I find amusing about the reactions to this guy's article is that they are lambasting him for, essentially, being correct. He's right that SMTP is the wrong way to do mail on the Internet. He's right that IPv4 is obsolete. And he's right that, in the former case, nobody is even working on solving the problem. Whereas in the latter case, the hard work that's being done to replace IPv4 is largely being ignored by people who are perfectly happy to just run NATs everywhere and hope for the best.
Instead of making fun of what this gentleman has to say, you might want to listen.
I think this is terribly unfair. It should at least be a *challenge*.
What color is the sky on your planet? Never ever take a working code base and re-develop it from scratch? First of all, rumor (in the form of TFA) has it that the code base *isn't* working. Secondly, the refactoring of Mozilla took such a long time that a lot of people gave up on it, and in fact there's a very nice replacement for it called WebKit. This is a win-win situation.
The question here is, can the Bulgarian team do it. Apparently CMU believes they can. Why not wait and see what the outcome is before rushing to judgement?
Of course it makes sense. Otherwise it wouldn't have gotten popular. The question is, does it *work*, or is it just a nice theory?
For some reason, whenever I see that word in reference to programming, I want to run screaming in the opposite direction. Does that make me a bad person?
Hard drives contain a *lot* of recyclable material - they're mostly metal. If you throw yours in the trash, you are indeed creating a lot of unnecessary waste.
Um. I wasn't talking about CDs. I can get high-quality digital audio on iTunes or Amazon right now, and there is no physical media, and no box to throw out.
Why, oh why, does nobody actually read to the end of the comment anymore? :'}
Great. More crap to throw out. Isn't one of the big selling features of digital distribution that it produces less crap to landfill?
These rationalizations all sound great, but they are just that: rationalizations. Corporate users don't operate on a grand level on the basis of rationalizations. Corporate users will not lead the deployment of IPv6.
Who led the personal computer revolution? Corporations? No. Corporations are conservative. They follow the trailing edge, not the leading edge. Corporations adopted PCs because their employees started finding ways around corporate policies /against/ PCs, not because of some grand central plan to do so.
IPv6 adoption will go the same way. Individuals who discover uses for IPv6 will start using it. Departments will adopt it. Large IT organizations will legislate against it. Eventually it'll be deployed because the people who actually use the network will have enough pull to tell the IT departments what to do.
So look for IPv6 adoption to happen first in the home, and later in internal corporate teams, and *finally* at the corporate level. Not vice versa.
If you're going to use screws, for God's sake get an impact driver and not a regular electric drill/driver. It'll cost four times as much, and cut the time you spend dealing with stripped heads by at least the same factor.
I have a Bosch impact driver, cost me $200 at toolladies.com, and in the month I've owned it and the two small projects I've done with it so far it's got to have saved me at least five hours of work.
Of course, the problem isn't people who want to live off their works for the rest of their lives. It's people who want those works to remain under copyright protection for half a century or more after the author has died. And it's all of the works that nobody is making any money on anymore, but that nevertheless are lost to the world because, since they are under copyright, and the owners of the copyright can't be located, the works can't be digitized.
China's burning a huge amount of coal, which is, believe it or not, even worse than petroleum.
You might want to read the article. Iridium may not dissolve when exposed to aqua regia, but it's too brittle to machine. Bodes ill.
Consider getting a ring made of damascus steel. Just make sure they've smoothed off the rough edges first. Rings made this way are quite beautiful.
We went with platinum. What's the big deal about gold? You can't make a fuel cell with gold!
Dude, it's right there in the Silmarillion. What kind of geek are you, anyway?
The bottom line is that unless you don't have any online presence, your email address is going to leak, and it's going to wind up on spammer's lists. If you want to avoid getting spam, some other solution is called for.
Um, hello, what good is an encrypted transport if you don't know who you're talking to? And if all your data is going through an MitM, in what sense is the initial handshake that establishes your connection secure?
The point of ssh and ssl is to make sure that nobody eavesdrops on your communications, and to make sure that you are talking to whom you think you are talking. These two go hand in hand. If you can't get the second, you don't have the first.
So really, all that an encrypted connection does in the absence of identity verification is to give you a false sense of security.
When your mind isn't working well, there are scams that you can buy into. One of the classic 419 scams is to tell you that you're the heir of a guy from Australia (or South Africa, if you live in Australia) who made a fortune in mining, died with no relatives, and mentioned you in his will because of a kindness you did 40 years ago.
It's not illegal for you to get the inheritance. It's just hard, because of issues involving international money transfers. You could be totally willing to, and even planning to, pay the taxes once the money arrives. But before it arrives, there are some banking fees you'll have to pay, which are only large because the amount being transfered is so much larger.
Seriously, guys. Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Actually, what it's no different than is your grandmother getting her purse rifled through by the nice man she thought she could trust, and some drugs stashed there. And then getting arrested for it.
It's not just dumb people. It's your mom or dad, if they wind up with some kind of aging-related disease that affects their judgement. Or you, in a few years. Losing everything because of that is a pretty harsh outcome.
Well, sort of. If you have a DNSSEC-aware resolver, and you are looking up a record in a signed zone, then the man-in-the-middle attack you're proposing doesn't work, because the signatures don't check out. So it is possible to prevent the problem you're describing.
The reason we have this problem is, very simply, that in many of the larger TLDs, the top-level zone is not signed. So there's no chain of trust, so even if you sign your zone, I have no way to get your key, because I have no chain of trust to follow.
There are solutions to this - register in a signed TLD, like .se, for example. Or use DNS Lookaside Validation. But ultimately the situation you describe will continue to be the default until the big zones are signed, and people who do transactions that require security start signing their zones.
It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, unfortunately.